Since no company can own or gather ALL the data on anything that is directly or indirectly related to their business, the question almost always comes "where do I get more high quality data?".
Often the first challenge after starting to use data is data co-measurement and comparability but immediately after that the questions of data accuracy and quality arises. Once our own data is succesfully in use (and perhaps a little earlier), reflection begins on where we could get more quality data to enrich existing data and understand longer cause-and-effect chains from data.
As I said in the first sentence, it is practically impossible (and often expensive as well as stupid) to try to collect all the data on everything, make sure it does not become obsolete, it is high quality and complies with various regulations. So it’s easier to think about where I can get this data to use. There are many ways but only some of these are thought and managed in a structured and strategic way.
There are several thousand (if not tens of thousands) open and public repositories in the world from which you can download information for your own use if suitable content can be found. Often there is a problem with these that there may not always be a lot of information on qualitative characteristics (where the information was collected, from whom, when, when it was updated, accuracy, what the information is allowed to use and so on). Would you dare to make valuable business decisions based on such data? Often not, but it does not prevent the use of data under certain boundary conditions and assumptions.
One option to obtain more data is to exchange, collect, and request it from members of your own business network or ecosystem. This would be a great option if there were really some mechanisms (technical, legal and business) to put this into practice. Annoyingly, these blanks end up with no contract templates in place, metadata about the data is not in good condition, or the data being designated under the Data Protection Policies, so sharing is not possible.
Then there is the opportunity to buy data. This is now and immediately feasible even though there are still an infinite number of data sellers. Let me be clear, we haven’t come across more than a hundred companies that we’ve guided in data matters than the less than five who regularly buy themselves valuable data from the internet and are willing to sell their own data right away. Almost everyone is interested in these things but only a fraction are doing this right now. Should you?
the more data sellers there are in the market, the more there is to buy and the faster more data can be processed into more valuable insights for business. That's why we really need data economy and best practices around that!